Advent Conspiracy, Week Four

Apparently, this Advent Conspiracy thing is catching on. Tom Krattenmaker mentions AC in his USA Today column this morning.

Here's what is supposed to show up in The Oconee Leader this week. Thanks again to Rob Peecher for running these articles every week.

Pop quiz: what one word will describe Christmas morning for you and your family? Here are the three most likely answers from the good people in Oconee County.

Tradition.

Christmas is about memories. Road trips to visit family. Christmas Eve candlelight services. Reading ‘The Night Before Christmas.’ Not sleeping on the night before Christmas. Leaving milk and cookies for Santa. Dad eating the aforementioned milk and cookies. Little kids with bed head and footie pajamas hyperventilating with excitement and anticipation. Ripping open presents. Christmas music in the background. Playing with new toys. Trying on new clothes. Everyone. Is. Happy.

Or how about this? Family.

Nothing like Christmas to get three brothers who are normally plotting bodily harm against each other to transform into the best of friends. Co-conspirators. Sharing the thrill of hitting the jackpot together. It’s the college freshman returning home to something familiar only to find that life didn’t stop when they headed off to school. Parents adjusting to the new son-in-law. Granddaddy in his red Christmas pants that rest just below his armpits. Grandma kissing everyone including crazy Cousin Eddie from Eastaboga. Everyone passing the new baby around like a bucket of chicken. Group pictures where everyone smiles and will later wonder why they ever thought wearing that outfit was a good idea.

But then if we’re being honest. Presents.

Loot. Bling. Stuff. Dare I say – booty. The hopes and fears of the last three months since we made our list are realized in those critical moments where we wonder why Mom uses an entire roll of scotch tape to wrap every present. The frantic destruction of perfectly good bows and boxes when we’re kids gives way to a veneer of patience and an air of something close to indifference in adults as we unwrap what we hope and pray to whatever gods are out there that this is a touch iPod and not a solar calculator.

Sound familiar?

Here’s what I’m wondering – as good as your Christmas is going to be, what if there’s something we’re missing that would make it even better. Better than the fruit cake from Aunt Gertie? Surprisingly, yes.

For the past three weeks, I’ve encouraged you to consider becoming part of Advent Conspiracy (www.adventconspiracy.org), an international movement of churches and individuals who have joined together to spend less on gifts for family and friends, choosing to give relational gifts and use the money saved to help some of the 1.1 billion people around the world who don’t have access to clean water. Nothing like a call to compassion to dampen the wildfires of consumerism that marks Christmas in pretty much every home in our neighborhood.

But at the end of the day, trading in consumerism for compassion rings a bit hollow. Don’t get me wrong, it’s better to give than to receive, right? Right? But what if there’s something more revolutionary to this conspiracy than clean water? What if Christmas is ultimately about living water that came to earth as a baby born to peasants who would bring hope, peace, love and joy by being poured out so that thirsty people like you and me and crazy Cousin Eddie from Eastaboga would never be thirsty again? What if making sure that everyone gets clean water is part of helping those same people find their deepest thirst quenched by an all-satisfying, infinitely-valuable Jesus?

Want to do something radical this Christmas? Worship Christ. You’ll find him buried beneath the Santa wrapping paper in your living room on Christmas morning. At last that’s where he tends to end up at my house.

Advent Conspiracy. Love All. Spend Less. Give More. All in the name of Worshipping More.

Comments

[Trevor]

Amen, brother. I've made it a prayer to try to worship this year amid the consumerism and the memories. Who knows if I'll succeed? But then again, why should Christmas be any different than other days? Shouldn't I be practicing His advent every time I wake up?

[Trevor]

Amen, brother. I've made it a prayer to try to worship this year amid the consumerism and the memories. Who knows if I'll succeed? But then again, why should Christmas be any different than other days? Shouldn't I be practicing His advent every time I wake up?

[Matt Adair]

Trevor - certainly our life should be marked by a regular hunger and thirst for Christ. I do think that seasons like Advent help create rhythms where things that can get lost in the shuffle (like our desires for God amidst the desires for everything else around us) get brought front and center into our universe.

[rob]

While I agree with most of what you have to say, I'd like to say that there's nothing wrong with tradition, there's nothing wrong with family and there's nothing wrong with presents.

An effect, I suspect, of the consumerism that surrounds Christmas is that the meaning of Christmas becomes inescapable. Everywhere you turn in the weeks preceding and after Thanksgiving you're getting hit with Christmas. And regardless of the attempts by some militant atheists, you can't get past the fact that Christmas is about the birth of our Savior. Even if it's the debates on the news about whether or not the "true meaning" of Christmas is being forgotten or whether the schools should have "Christmas Holidays" or "Winter Holidays."

Even in South Park, Mr. Hankey reminds us that "for some people Christmas is about the birth of Jesus."

Because of the consumerism, people are getting a dose of the message that they might not be getting at any other time of the year. Isn't it possible, even likely, that God is using the consumerism to bring people to him who for years have only heard about his Son in the songs piped through the speakers at the mall? Because of what the holiday has become, is it possible that God might be reaching the hearts of some people who only go to church on Christmas eve?

As Christians, Christmas gives us an opportunity to reach out to non-believers, and we should see it as such.

The government should fund some kind of study to determine how many people start a path to becoming believing Christians over the Christmas holidays.

That said, I'm altogether with you on spending less and worshipping more.

[Matt Adair]

Rob - see, this is what happens when you rattle off an article while living with a sinus infection. I completely agree with you that tradition and family and presents are not bad in and of themselves. Each of those can, and often do, point people to a Jesus who has no beginning or end (tradition), to a Jesus who left his father's side in order to rescue and redeem and renew his brothers and sisters (family), to a Jesus who gave us the greatest gift ever in himself.

My concern is simply that it's easy to disconnect good things from Jesus.

Knowing your political leanings, I did chuckle at your advocating government sponsorship of anything...

And you might be on to something with the whole God-uses-Christmas-idea: http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/2007/12/christmas-shopping-what-should-it-look.html